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Purple Prose
Just today, on That Other Wiki:For example, a short, flat back atop long legs accentuates his lofty bearing, and his hips appear higher than the withers. His natural beauty is austere and architectural, sharply contrasting the arabesque loveliness of the Saluki, or the rather somber dignity of the Sloughi. Almond eyed, lean and graceful, his profile is at once sere but harmonious, his presence aristocratic and aloof. He moves with a distinctly feline plastique, collected, elastic, and articulate, his demeanor guarded and mysterious, his glance feral, untamed. (This describes the Azawakh, a breed of dog.) *"The world goes black.The credits roll."-Final sentence from the book Quarterhouse by E.L. Treacy which I'm unlikely to ever write.(I bag the title,It's mine) *Radioactive Zombie exhaled in guilt, before raising his exhausted, strained orbs at the glowing rectangle that sat on his littered, battered desk, before aligning his fingers with the keys to type: He admits that, as his favorite style of fiction were those of young men embarking on quests to shoot people or save the day, and, appalled by the lack of description, action, and generally horrendous passages that would make English professors nauseous and cry out in despair, he began to read other pieces of work, lavished with positive praise, which were filled to the brim with metaphors, similes, odd writing styles, and description. **Yeah. Generally, he got tired of people not being descriptive, and kept wondering why people like Pynchon, Robbins, Conrad, and other "classic" writers got away with it. Me thinks his own works are guilty of both being descriptive and using too much of it. *This Troper once had an English teacher who tried to make us all write exclusively in Purple Prose. Since I adjust my writing style to fit my audience, I had no problem adapting, and the next year when I had a teacher that loathed Purple Prose, I just switched to a style that would suit her. **And this one had a teacher that almost always spoke in Purple Prose. Most of us—okay, all of us—had a hard, hard time in his class (some barely made it). *Although the inveterate reader may perchance encounter oeuvres of an older, less pragmatic age in which this trope is used to decent, if misguided, effect (works which are embraced as classics among those of an academic bent and regarded, for all their flawed incomprehensibility, with a nostalgic affection), the unironic inclusion of purple prose in a modern work (which, by dint of its aforementioned indigo-hued locution, is almost inevitably unpublished) tends to be the hallmark of an insecure, pretentious, and oftentimes naive young wordsmith endeavoring to erect between himself and the world an all-too-thin facade of sagacity and erudition. **Indeed, This Troper herself - concealing her identity and good name behind the modest veil of anonymity - confesses (to her undying shame) to having written certain amateur works in her younger and less enlightened days which, through their excessively florid diction, gave the distinct impression of being the products of a passionate, carnal, and ill-advised liaison between herself and the thesaurus. ***The editors will have this troper's thesaurus when they pry prize prise it from her cold, dead gelid, lifeless hands manual organs. ***Brevity is the soul of wit. ***Also of lingerie. ***As remarked by the famous windbag Polonius. The full quote begins thus, and continues for some considerable time: My liege, and madam, to expostulate What majesty should be, what duty is, Why day is day, night night, and time is time, Were nothing but to waste night, day and time. Therefore, since brevity is the soul of wit, And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes, I will be brief: your noble son is mad: Mad call I it; for, to define true madness, What is't but to be nothing else but mad? But let that go. **This troper and his college classmates are somewhat prone to use flowery language in college works and exams, not only to fake erudition (sometimes doesn't work, as a teacher once commented a really exaggerated phrase with "?"), but also to take up as much space as possible. **This troper submitted a computer science master's thesis written in a fairly simple fashion in the deluded basis that writing was meant to be, you know, a way to communicate ideas to someone else. It was returned full of red marks and indications to, essentially, make it look grander and be much harder to understand. (Considering how many big words were in that sentence without me even trying, you can imagine how the final version looked.) *Secondary education campuses are especially prone to the consummate detrimental effects of intense red-blue mixed colouration of educational creative verbal expression, under the lackadaisical approach of a controlled manner of educational discipline. To further worsen the cancerous ramifications of the aforementioned 'purple prose', the amalgamation of middle-teenage hormonal crisis-affected expression and vampiric urban-fantasy romance sagas have concocted a most vicious, vile concoction. (This troper nearly died writing the above statement.) **What I think he's saying is that Twilight has screwed up everything. *High school students are made to do this for their essays. Particularly for English. **Some of these high school students write fanfiction when they should be writing their essays. See above. ***As an interesting twist, one of this Troper's friends at high school once wrote a story for English with a main character deliberately named Mary Sue... ***Because of her fanfiction-writing hobby, this troper has crashed into a lot of problems in English because she refuses, on principle, to write purple prose. As she once (famously) screamed in her English class... "WHO NEEDS TO USE FIFTEEN WORDS FOR HAPPY IN THE SAME FREAKING SENTENCE? **This troper's teacher marks students down when they're excessively wordy. In fact, it's a rule among the English department. Thank god! (Oddly enough, one of the English teachers adores Twilight. She knows it's horrible writing, though. Hmm..) *This troper's sister speaks purple prose when upset. She seems to think it's impressive or elegant, and is thus horribly offended when this troper cannot control her snickering. *This troper last fall was writing this (now Old Shame) story about this boy at school in the drama club with her who spurned her; however, she couldn't decide whether she wanted the story to be serious or if she wanted to make a total mockery of herself in it. Well, whenever she was in the mood to make it silly, she basically slathered purple patches over what she was writing, composing such Narmtastic gems as these: **"I glanced to the right â€“ down East Bridge â€“ and saw the red of their taillights reflect in every puddle down the street â€“ all those drops of dihydrogen monoxide in this daylong storm joining together and becoming part of liquid mirrors shattering onto sidewalks from the road â€“ then covered my eyes as the thunder roared and the storm picked up." **"Standing barely separated by a foot, I could distinctly hear his soft breathing as he moved his paintbrush up and down the door and slathered more blood on it to smear it up and down and thereby commence a war between the red, the door frame, and the air in which the paint would dry. The life force within it that allows it to flow gently out of a tilted bucket onto the plate holding the rollers would die and its soul would evaporate." *I used to write in purple prose until my friend commented on it and explained to me that I didn't need a bunch of adjectives to flower up my writing. Unfortunately, it seems that nowadays I'm not descriptive enough, and my writing tends to come off as plain, bland and vague. I can't seem to find middle-ground. *This troper has always found the sort of animal roleplays that force participants to substitute words like "eye" with "orb" to be absolutely retarded. In her early Internet years she roleplayed Redwall, and can't count how many times people would link to those kinds of sites for laughs. She can only assume that since being in the Redwall fandom usually involves reading books, its members were better able to see and mock how stupid these "orbs," "sabers," and "auds" were. Many took great pleasure in heading over to troll their scentposts symposia boards with English that made sense. *This troper's in-character arch-nemesis in her online gaming faction is prone to this. Not just in the stories he posts to the forums (which are also posted in an elaborate font), but in actual in-game chat. Oddly enough, his dialogue is never prone to lag, so she suspects said he's a champion-ship level fast typer. Thankfully, he has a great grasp of description and atmosphere, though it's prone to causing one to love hating him. *Kaelis Ra is writing an novel, where the main character sometimes goes into this. Most often, it is when he is brutally killing someone, like piledriving them from a skyscraper. *This troper averts it wherever possible and/or subverts to get a dissonance effect, usually a comical one. Example? A whole paragraph of Anne Rice-styled first-person narration, with vampire calling himself a "creature of masquerade" (a Shout Out both to Jaw's song and Vampire The Masquerade), ending with "Tell ya what: whatever they say, it's bullshit." *This troper used to be horrible about this; she's since gone into the other end and has been unable to write in anything other than Beige Prose. *This troper thinks of purple prose the same way they think of constipation; that's way too much effort spent on a load of crap. *The Tall One sat ponderingly at her desk, musing over the way best to communicate her dire affliction to the others. She stared moodily at the examples already residing on the page. With an exhale, her ivory-pale fingers moved gracefully over the ebony keyboard, dexterously plucking the square buttons, recording for all time, her inability to type a sentence without making it a few dozen words longer than it had to be, a most wicked habit that had haunted her since infancy, a good many years ago, despite not being able to write as a mere babe, which led to the thought.... *I started off a fantasy book I'm writing with a satirical parody of this, with a scene describing a carpet in great detail which, overall, has no effect whatsoever on the plot other than being in the same room as a main character. I'm just hoping that, if it gets to the point where other people read it, they won't mistake it for actual bad writing. *this Troper fully intends to use Purple Prose in part of her writing, in particular in regards to an extremely over-the-top and extremely ugly wedding dress. *This Troper uses some degree of purple prose in all of her english essays. Apparently Tropes Are Not Bad, however, as her essays all received A's. *Ripsaw has a very simple method for averting this: I write by hand, then transcribe to the computer. I'll often expand the writing while I'm typing, but the basic structure remains and limits that expansion. Since I'm lazy, and get writer's cramp easily, I tend to write small words and short passages. That being said, I have problems describing people, so while my dialog is pretty good, and my scene descriptions are decent, my characterizations are rather one-dimensionalflat. *I once had the idea to write a story about someone who mostly thought simply, but would sometimes get deeply philosophical, the writing using this when he was philosophical, and Beige Prose when he wasn't. I'm not confident in my writing skills however, so I didn't actually write it. *Neo Silver Thorn generally avoids purple prose. He makes some use of it (Usually dialouge in the occasional steampunk foray), but prefers, as a whole, to avoid it. *A friend of this troper is involved in the furry subculture and finds herself dealing with this all the time. In one night's chat session, said friend decided to lampoon it by making a joke character concept. **->"Calling eyes orbs and pools, tails cords, whips, banners, and flags, calling bodies bodices, ears auds, and so on and so forth." **->"Its name will be Thessie and have no clear gender. It'll be as big as a horse. It'll wear a leather bodice corset. Its tail will change on mood from a vacumn cleaner cord, to a bicycle flag on a stick, to party streamers. The legs will be made out of marble and look like Greek pillars, with the front paws being eagle talons. It'll have a mohawk made of black ebony stone and its eyes will be different - one will be a glass ball (orb) filled with koi (a pool) and the other will be an eight ball (pool orb). The ears will have Australian dollars marked on the back (AUD) and coins in the ear lobes (AUD coins). They will crank out slender financial sheets like receipts (audit)." *This troper was completely guilty of this in 2007. He had the ever-wise idea of giving Na No Wri Mo a try that year. When he only had three or four days to get to the 50000-word quota and had about 10000 more words to go, he ended up filling up three full pages by describing six one-shot characters with as much detail as possible. *A while ago This Troper had an English lesson where we had to describe a certain biscuit in the most imaginative way possible. Others in my class created some very strange stories, but this troper refused on the grounds that my standards won't let me write in Purple Prose. I also said to the teacher that trying to make a biscuit into something else felt like a lie to me. *One of the things this troper does when editing his work is red-shifting his prose (he's also quite proud of that expression). His favorite writer is Chesterton, see, whose style is virulently contagious. Edwardian-style flourishes sound very odd in the middle of a style otherwise more similar to Tony Hillerman. *Guilty as charged. I had a real problem with this in my essays for AP English. I was incredibly wordy; I would just go on and on about a point I was trying to make. Thankfully, I grew out of it before the year ended and learned that you can say more by saying less. *This troper has volunteered to edit a story which appears, a quarter of the way in, to have been intended as a parody of Fanny Hill. Purple Prose, IKEA Erotica, excessively formal dialogue and zero-dimensional characters. The going was... painful. *This troper has a fondness for going into depth in his writing. I'll usually start by explaining something, and then going to a more in-depth explanation; often, I'll use a general description or metaphor, and then go and explain why that explanation or metaphor was wrong, or expand on it. (Note that this entry is, in it's entirety, an example of his usual writing style). *This troper's best friend once wrote a piece of slash fiction that made use of the phrase "rosy buds," among other things. *This troper tends to sway between Purple Prose and Beige Prose in an almost bipolar fashion. Sometimes in the same sentence. (She always makes a point to go back and edit the purply bits, however.) *It pains me to write Purple Prose when the majority of her stories are written in Beige Prose. She had to adjust because her English final has a creative writing component that absolutely demands Purple Prose. She passed. *This troper flat-out admitted that in her SF stories, she writes about rocket launches and touchdowns in "a pulse-pounding, play-by-play, semi-fetishistic" manner. *This troper was taught from childhood to never write in Purple Prose, which is also why she can't. It gets annoying when she has to use flowery writing when taking the dreaded statewide writing exam. *The simplistic yet notable art of describing the world around you in a perverce and piloshopical way is one of the very few ways I, being the antisocial nerd that the powers that be have decread, mannaged to confuse and annoy the many people who seem to wish to see me rithing in pain... *This troper only uses purple prose in parodies or school related things. In her own time, everything is written very succinctly. Just for fun, she once answered one of those social interview type questions on Facebook about a friend of hers in this style, going into immense detail about our courtship and wedding that would follow. Long story short- it backfired in a horrible way proving once and for all, Purple prose is evil. *This troper has a friend who is an aspiring writer, unfortunately, her work is so drenched in Purple Prose that the only coherent thought I can manage after reading a paragraph is "what". Hopefully she'll get better. Category:Troper Tales